If you’re on Liquid Web servers, this was already done for you. If you’re not, you should still be able to use this code on your own ModSecurity instance. Since this is a way better method to block people than via a plugin, in my opinion, I thought it would be a good idea to share it here. With this rule, you won’t have quite as many http requests.

WordPress is a popular publishing platform which is known for its robust features, numerous templates, and large support community. Unfortunately, due to such popularity, WordPress is also constantly subject to attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities. Ensuring WordPress and any associated plugins are installed with the most current versions is an important means of securing your site. However, ModSecurity provides a significant amount of further security by providing an application firewall.

ModSecurity (also known as “modsec”) has proven itself useful in a variety of situations, and again this is true in assisting with WordPress brute force attempts resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. While a number of WordPress plugins exist to prevent such attacks, custom modsec rules can prevent such attacks for all WordPress installations on a server. Modsec immediately filters incoming HTTP requests, which assists against taxing server resources.

These rules will block access for the offending IP address for 5 minutes upon 10 failed login attempts over a 3 minute duration. These rules have been automatically updated in the custom rules for Liquid Web’s ServerSecure service. For customers without ServerSecure, these rules can be added to their custom modsec rules. To accomplish this, edit your custom modsec user rules and append the file with the rules provided below. For CPanel servers, this file is likely located at /usr/local/apache/conf/

Logically, someone can extend this code to any file, like bb-login.php or Special:UserLogin, depending on where they’re being hacked.

ETA: Rarst asked if I’d have to use wildcards with Locationmatch since WP is often in a subfolder. I read the Apache doc on locationmatch and it says that it’s using regex, so it should just look for ‘/wp-login.php’ in the URL. If I wanted to only look for example.com/wp-login.php then I’d use ^wp-login.php instead. If I got that wrong, please let me know!